Robert Hornak
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail. com and @roberthornak on X.
The brilliant physicist Isaac Newton stated in his third law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Politics works very much the same way: for every political action there is a not necessarily equal but very opposite reaction.
Abortion is a good example. By 1910, Abortion was illegal in every state. But in the early 1960’s, atti- tudes were changing with an outbreak of rubella that resulted in horrible birth defects. By the time Roe was decided in 1973, 17 states had legalized abortion, and many others were on the same path.
There was strong sentiment then that the process should have been left to each state to make their own regulations as they do with just about every other issue, including those protected by the Bill of Rights. That stood until the inevi-table reaction of the Dobbs case, returning the regulation of abortion to the states.
Now we see a similar series of events unfolding over immigration. For decades there was shared set of values that our border should be protected, that people who were caught entering the country illegal- ly would be deported, and people caught living here illegally were subject to deportation pending extenuating circumstances.
This was so true that President Obama was sometimes called the “deporter in chief” because of the record number of illegal immigrants he deported.
Where Obama deported an av- erage of 400,000 people a year, that actually dropped by approximately half during Trump’s first term, with a total of 935,000 people deported over his four years.
But everything changed under the Biden administration. He even went so far as to fly immigrants into the country in the dead of night and created an app that allowed people to enter and live here and to sched- ule asylum appointments for years out.
Nobody knows for sure how many millions came illegally during the Biden years. No doubt Democrats thought they had scored a huge victory that could not be un- done.
Then came the reaction to the action. Trump immediately secured the border, ending the free flow of illegal aliens into the country. And in Tom Homan he entrusted the task of undoing what every-one thought couldn’t be undone. In NY, the Democrats joined with their colleagues around the country in trying to do everything in their power to stymie Trump’s aggressive reaction. While on the one hand many said they agreed that crimi- nals should be the ones deported, they did everything they could to make it as hard as possible to do that. This forced ICE to enter communities, where they also encountered people who had committed no other crime. But there is no rule that says it’s ok to be here as long as you behave. Instead of relenting and offering to help target the criminals, Democrats doubled down and started making accusations that ICE was “kidnapping” people or “disappearing” them in secret. In fact, Trump was simply using a process called Expedited Removal, which is used to quickly remove illegal immigrants.
It is described in an immigrant fact sheet as “a process by which low-level immigration officers can summarily remove certain noncitizens from the United States with- out a hearing before an immigration judge.”
Yes, it’s being used (legally) more aggressively than before, but this is the inevitable reaction to Biden’s decision to disregard all our im- migration laws. An extreme action followed by the natural counterbalancing reaction. Like the laws of physics, laws of human nature can’t be ignored. NY Democrats would be well advised to rethink their po- sition here.
